The 55 Greatest Works of Philosophical Fiction

By several standards Frankenstein is a very poorly written novel. The narrative wanders all over, bogging down in irrelevant subplots and extraneous characters, the characters (except for one) are thinly and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Wikipedia • Amazon

Les Misérables is one of the few translated books English speakers know by the original title, in part because we are familiar with the name (or its abbreviation Les Miz) from popular film and stage productions. But.... Critique • Quotes • Wikipedia • Amazon

After spending a good part of a summer living in and out of War and Peace, I was dismayed to learn Leo Tolstoy disdained the book in his latter years. The novel, whose title has become shorthand for monumentally.... Critique • Quotes • Wikipedia • Amazon

I'm not sure we should even call Erewhon a novel. If it is one, it's a novel of ideas. Not like, say, one of Aldous Huxley's novels of ideas though. Great ideas don't play out among characters or decide the plot. In Butler's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Wikipedia • Amazon

What's incredible about Middlemarch, George Eliot's masterwork, is how engrossing it is. I mean, this is a novel that deals with issues of art, education reform, scholarly research, medical science and provincial British politics.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Wikipedia • Amazon

I wonder if people who refer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a cautionary tale—that is, those who aren't confusing it with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—could actually spell out what it is cautioning against.... Critique • Quotes • Wikipedia • Amazon

Despite focusing on a specific event, place and time in Chinese history—the Communist uprising in Shanghai and its brutal suppression by the Kuomintang over a few days in 1927—Man's Fate reads more like a French.... Critique • Quotes • Wikipedia • Amazon

The books that became cult—and counterculture—favourites in the iconoclastic 1960s and early 1970s can be divided into two categories: 1. Those that were written during and for that period, such as Stranger in a.... Critique • Quotes • Translations • Wikipedia • Amazon

George Orwell's dystopian novel has had the fortune to be acclaimed in the West by two usually opposed groups—right wingers and left wingers. The former saw it as a denunciation of collectivism in all its forms.... Critique • Quotes • Wikipedia • Amazon

Dune's timing was perfect. Launched in the mid-sixties around the beginning of the modern environmental movement, Frank Herbert's ecology-conscious science fiction novel and its many sequels and adaptation.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Wikipedia • Amazon

Two kinds of people are apt to hate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: advanced philosophy majors and advanced novel readers. As a novel, Zen is terrible. Virtually no narrative, cardboard characters, and generally.... Critique • Quotes • Wikipedia • Amazon

If you're well-versed in science fiction—or speculative fiction as it's often called—and you approach The Handmaid's Tale as an example of that genre, you may be disappointed. The world of Margaret.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Wikipedia • Amazon